


And Leave The World Unseen

by surprisinglyOK



Category: History Boys (2006), History Boys - All Media Types, History Boys - Bennett
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon Gay Character, Gen, Mental Breakdown, Post-Canon, Pre-Slash, University
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-06
Updated: 2017-09-21
Packaged: 2018-10-28 20:30:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10838880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/surprisinglyOK/pseuds/surprisinglyOK
Summary: Short angsty thingy about Posner's breakdown. The two chapters are intended to be complementary companion pieces, with chapter 1 Pos-centric and chapter 2 Scripps-centric, so it's both of their POVs on it all? Rated M for dark themes, idk how the rating or tagging works.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi this is my first fic and it's angsty af so please do tread with caution and be aware of triggers for depression, mentions of suicide attempt and general dark mental health themes!! This is sort of pre-slash but also can be read as gen? Really just an introspective look at both Pos and Scripps during Posner's breakdown/recovery (having said a lot of this is very dark, it ends in a hopeful sort of way!). Enjoy!

He doesn’t know when it was that everything went wrong.

Maybe it was his first day at university, when he had been dropped off with his pair of battered suitcases, feeling the smallest he’d ever felt as he turned to squint up at the looming Founder’s Tower, the floral, powdery scent of his mother’s perfume lingering long after she had enveloped him in a tearful hug and bid him farewell. Maybe it was before that; perhaps the day he had received his embossed acceptance letter and had felt the excitement and hopefulness bubbling under his skin like the fizzing champagne that tickled his nose and made his eyes water while he laughed and celebrated with those scruffy, ridiculous, clever bunch of uncouth ruffians he called his friends. Maybe it was the day he sat the exam and downplayed the most tragic event to ever destroy his own family, or the one a few weeks before that when he had finally given in to Irwin’s rhetoric that had him shrugging off atrocities and spinning yarns to make himself sound sufficiently _avant garde_ in the hopes that a tutor might find him cleverer and more inspiring than perhaps he really was. Maybe it was when he first found himself falling in love with Dakin, _stupid, cocky, charming Dakin_ , and was forced to realise that this feeling of otherness, this detachment from the world around him that swirled like a fog of loneliness permeating his very bones, was never going to go away. He should have known then, really, that a sad and lonely boy is destined to become a sad and lonely man, spiralling into never-ending cycles of emptiness and self-loathing, lost and forgotten amongst the folds of a universe that speeds by in great swathes of colour, while he can do nothing but stand still and watch.

He had had such high hopes. A new start, a chance to finally find himself within the cool stone of towering colleges and at the bottom of endless glasses of port; a fresh look at the world around him that was ripe with opportunity and the hope that he might soon come to find the place where he fit, people from whom he wasn’t _different_. He would only realise later that he had never really been looking for a new environment, but a new self; what he had been desperately trying to find was a way that he could become _normal_ , a character transplant, a book that could instruct him on how to not be small, gay, Jewish Posner. The one thing that he had really been running from was the one thing he couldn’t shake, the thing that stared back at him in the mirror with hollow, tired eyes, the thing that had begun its Oxford career by punishing its body with caffeine and alcohol and ended it with a handful of pills. It was the thing that had resigned itself to haunting the library out of a fear of reality, before even its ability to read had sputtered and petered out and left it doing nothing but lying in bed day after day staring at the ceiling alternating between gasping through tears of wretched despair and dully blinking its burning sleep-deprived eyes able to think of nothing but its own hollow aching emptiness _stupid useless get up and do something for a change instead of wallowing in your hovel of self-pity you fucking idiot_.

Things had started well, at least. He had struggled along through his reading lists alongside everyone else, suffered some of the terrible tutorials and more of the promising ones, pulled all-nighters to meet deadlines, winced as his eyes flitted across his latest essay to find some scathing remark asking whether he’d _really_ understood that last periodical – all common experiences over which the Sheffield boys cheerfully commiserated whilst drinking cans of cheap beer from the local Tesco. Though there had been both good times and bad times, it was the bad that slowly began to dominate and deepen. This was meant to be the start of his life, so why did he feel so stagnant? Wasn’t this all he had been working for? Wasn’t this where he was supposed to come into his own, to find people like him, to shake the loneliness, the darkness, that had followed him like a raincloud for the entirety of his school years, to finally emerge from his chrysalis of other people’s pity and his own feelings of inadequacy? Even after those weeks of intensive psychiatric prodding in hospital, he has still not managed to determine the source of the loneliness that he has always, _always_ felt, the unkind voices that have ticked quietly under his skin for as long as he can remember. He pins it somewhere inside himself as potentially innate, or else borne of the crippling perfectionism that has become a constant compulsion to do _better, more_. Maybe it’s that he’s different somehow. Maybe it’s that he has always _felt_ different. Whatever the spark to his ever-growing flames of self-loathing, his friends had flourished as he had withered, continued to run while he had ground to a halt. Maybe there was no single reason why things had started taking a downward turn but, once they had, there was no stopping them.

It’s warm in the hospital waiting room, and he feels strangely calm as he wraps his arms around his torso, settling into the softness of his too-big jacket like a comfort blanket, something like the one he had when he was a young child. He hasn’t been coming here long, it being only his second appointment in the hospital of his hometown, and the labyrinth of winding white halls and purposefully marching nurses feel sterile and alien, although perhaps it could only ever feel like that, a liminal space between healthy and sick, life and death, that will forever smell like disinfectant and stark, airy quietness, devoid of character and people who aren’t broken in one way or another. At least he’s been discharged from inpatient care in Oxford, now free from the drips and gowns and beeping machines and lights that are never turned off, released from the stifling surveillance of eagle-eyed doctors who insisted on keeping him under suicide watch despite his protestations.

He isn’t sure whether he would have tried again, had he been given the opportunity to spend more than two minutes without the enforced company of various medical personnel and, since then, his vigilant, wary parents. Could he put them through that again? Probably not, now that he’s seen first-hand the wretched despair in his mother’s face, the haunted, hollow look in his father’s piercing blue eyes, the ones that Posner himself has inherited, grieving for someone not-yet dead, or someone who had perhaps died many years before.

His parents had been unfalteringly supportive, if overbearing, in a way that Posner could not quite find the words to express his gratitude for, encouraging him gently to emerge from his nest of covers to eat a bite of food on the days he struggled to lift his head under the crushing weight of hopelessness, helping him stumble to the shower when his whole body ached from days of lack of use and the recent shock of chemicals that were slowly working their way out of his system since he had choked them down his throat and followed them with half a bottle of whiskey.

It was surprising, to him at least, that somebody had bothered to come looking for him; less so that it was the ever-dependable Scripps who had been the one to find him there. Scripps hadn’t talked about what actually happened: why he had known to kick down the door when his knocks were met with silence, how he had managed to get hold of an ambulance. Posner hadn’t asked.

It doesn’t do any good to think of it all now.

He’ll be there after the appointment, Scripps; his mother only begrudgingly agreed to let him make his own way home after counselling on the promise that Scripps would be waiting for him at the end of it. The past few weeks, the tail-end of Trinity, had presumably brought prelims, punting and summer balls for those still living among the Spires, although Scripps had mentioned little of his news from Oxford in the card and two letters that he had sent to the Posner household since Posner himself had been discharged last week. But now the students had gone down for the summer vac, and Scripps had sheepishly turned up on his doorstep yesterday afternoon with a book of Wilde’s poetry and a bunch of subtly scented flowers to ‘welcome him back to the outside world’. Posner’s cracked lips had moulded painfully into a small smile as if they had half-forgotten how, and he had pulled his best friend into an awkward, one-armed hug, hoping that it would convey the words that his lungs couldn’t.

‘Christ, Pos, you look like you need feeding up.’

‘What would our good Lord say if He heard you taking His name in vain?’

Posner lifts his gaze from his worn trainers to glance at the clock on the wall. Doctor Griffiths is a couple of minutes late for their appointment, and Posner silently wills her to hurry up so that he’ll be allowed to leave on time to meet Scripps, before absently pondering the fact that this is the first time he has truly looked forward to something for several months. Scripps had informed Posner’s mother with a cheeky grin that he would be frog-marching her son back to the Scripps household for compulsory Sunday-afternoon-homemade-cake, much to Posner’s quiet gratitude, particularly after Scripps had turned to him with kind eyes to make clear that the ‘compulsory’ part was a joke, that of course everything was subject to what he might feel comfortable with. His soft reassurance had earned him a second of Posner’s smiles, this one a little stronger than the first.

‘David?’

Posner looks up as Doctor Griffiths steps into the waiting room and offers him a warm, expectant smile as she waits for him to rise and follow her into her room. Posner lets out a deep breath and stands, pulling his jacket more tightly around himself and looking at her squarely, steadily, bracing himself for an hour of whatever painful, embarrassing, terrifying torture he will face today. Maybe, again, he’ll come out of it at the end feeling a little bit less broken, less hopeless, less scared. And if not, he’ll come out of it to a sheepish smile, sparkling eyes and homemade cake, a warm brush of shoulder against shoulder, a gentle conversation, maybe a calloused hand touching his. And that, at least, will be enough.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Scripps-centric companion piece to my Posner chapter from earlier this summer. Again please be aware of your triggers, and be cautious if dark mental health themes, depression and suicide aren't your bag.

The very notion of hindsight ever being a ‘benefit’ is, in Scripps’ opinion, nothing but a sick joke.

With hindsight comes clarity, the dark and desperate events unfolding in perfect order, a stark light illuminating every clue, every hint that, if heeded, would surely have unmasked the result that was to come.  With hindsight comes powerlessness, the feeling that all you could have done is now obsolete, the moment passed, the opportunity to change things buried in the rubble of cause and effect, of fate, of time ticking constantly away, away, away.  With hindsight simply comes the realisation of what you _should_ have seen all along, what you failed to notice, or failed to properly address, at the time.

With hindsight comes guilt.

It had started off rather well, hadn’t it?  There was the alcohol-infused haze of Freshers’ Week, the blind terror of a first essay due not forty-eight hours following possibly the worst hangover Scripps had ever encountered in his life.  There were the good tutes, the bad ones, the bolshy, laddish laughter of his band of scruffy hooligans in The King’s Head after Matriculation, ties loosened and ugly gowns slung over their shoulders, shirt cuffs sticky with beer.  Posner had shone that day, his quiet, childlike light vibrating from every pore, alive with the sparkling energy of a young man stepping out of the nest and into this new and exciting world of spires and endless sky – it had been plain as day on his face.

He couldn’t blame himself, Scripps reasoned, for not predicting it all back then; no, but he could see the foundations being set after those first few weeks, every lost spark in his eyes, every distancing of the chasm between the boy and the world around him, laid out in a map so clear in Scripps’ mind now that he turned his attention to it that he could scream, lash out in anger and frustration at his own inability to foresee Posner’s natural destination before he inevitably arrived.  Pos had always been a fairly quiet person, a fairly morose person, one who was unafraid to defend his hotly held beliefs in a classroom but who maintained the forlorn air of a love unrequited, a lost soul drifting restlessly between worlds trying to find the one where he might, finally, fit.  And yet, there was a youthfulness, a brightness to him that showed occasionally when he forgot himself: when Scripps would challenge him to a bike race down the hill on the way home from school, or invite him over for his mother’s ginger cake on warm summer afternoons.  The excitement that Pos had radiated during their first weeks at Oxford should surely not have so easily masked the beginnings of the darkness that began to swell later into Michaelmas, Scripps shrugging it off as simple winter blues with only a dim awareness that he was doing so, despite the markers that were now so bitingly obvious with the _benefit of hindsight_.

The air is pleasantly warm as Scripps steps out of the cool mustiness of the church to unchain his bike for the cycle across town to the hospital.  He always finds it comforting to return to the pews upon which he’d done most of his deep adolescent _thinking_ , the hard wood and faint smell of candles like a familiar face to calm his clamouring thoughts as he sits, breathes, bows his head, and lets somebody else take control.  His daily spiritual meditation finished, he perches sideways on his bike seat, frees a dog-eared journal from the depths of his battered old backpack, and flicks to the most recent page.

‘Solace,’ he writes, and beneath it: ‘Latin: solari.’

He supposed he had just been too wrapped up in the blur of Oxford life to pay much attention to Posner’s demeanour – it was, after all, a dazzling change of scene for all of them, an academic pace the likes of which they had never before encountered and were now captured within, swept up in the tide of deadlines and all-nighters (in both the library and the less-than-glamorous bars of Park End Street).  He’d noticed a difference in him, admittedly, but of course he hadn’t thought it much more serious than was his long-running penchant for somewhat overindulgent moping, though Scripps’ anger at himself flares even for his fleeting thought of Posner’s desperate unhappiness as 'overindulgent'.  Should he have pondered more seriously the gradual waning of Posner’s presence at the Sheffield boys’ weekly pub outings, a presence that had eventually dwindled to total absence like a dying flame?  Perhaps; but Akthar, who was at the same College as Posner, said he seemed to constantly occupy the library poring over books, busy with his work, and this was something that Scripps could understand and accept without further question.  Wilful ignorance, perhaps, though his mother would sternly warn him against being so hard on himself.  And if the others had noticed the hollowness in Posner’s eyes, his gradual, quiet disappearance into the woodwork, they had said nothing of it.

He grits his teeth and climbs properly onto his bike, flipping the peddle with his foot so it lays flat, the sturdy frame under his hands and feet a welcome, solid reassurance, and pushes off.

With the threat of prelims looming at the end of Trinity had come a renewed vigour in the work ethic of his peers, pub trips unenthusiastically abandoned in favour of fervent study.  It wasn’t until he’d bumped into Akthar in the Covered Market one morning that Scripps had discovered Posner’s absence from any semblance of normal life, no longer haunting the library, and failing to respond to any thoughtful knock on his bedroom door.  While Akthar had simply shrugged, Scripps had felt the fluttering sense of unease in his stomach blossom into a worry he could not shake.  Maybe that was the guiding instinct behind heaving his full body weight against Posner’s door when there had been no answer to his knocks and calls, the battered old lock ripped from the frame by a final heavy kick, to reveal a dark mass sprawled on the carpet.

If he hadn’t…  How long?  Would it have been days?  A week?  Would his scout have found him, screamed when she dropped her bundle of bed linen, ghostly white like the face of this boy with death in his eyes and his hand inches from an empty pill bottle?

Scripps has to grip the handlebar of his bike and gulp in deep breaths of air to settle the nausea curdling in his stomach.  _There’s no use, no use in thinking about it_ …  The air rushes past, Scripps sounding his bell once as he rounds the corner where Hector’s bike shrieked and skidded, crushing the man’s head like an egg against the concrete.

Scripps had been with Posner throughout the ambulance ride, paramedics snapping at him to _stay back_ as they fitted his friend’s tiny frame with wires, his face unresponsive and looking younger than he had in a long time.  He had been sent home after hospital visiting hours were over, legs still shaking as he numbly boarded the bus back to the city centre.

Posner had regained consciousness within a couple of days, and was steadfastly refused discharge until he had endured a seemingly endless stint on suicide watch, during which time Scripps had reluctantly turned his attention back to his imminent exams.  Not that he had properly visited Pos in hospital in any case, preferring instead to skulk the halls and haunt the waiting rooms whilst gleaning news from irritable passing nurses, the prospect of facing again the lifeless, pasty shadow of someone so utterly hopeless stirring more sick panic in his stomach than he could stand to bear.

He'd sent a card, and assumed that Mr and Mrs Posner would fill in their son on his own involvement.  That was all he could manage.  The nurses muttered grimly of ‘nervous breakdown’ and ‘clinical depression’.  The Sheffield boys murmured of ‘poor old Pos’ in hushed, shocked tones, and Scripps avoided them.

Pulling up his bike outside the psych wing of Northern General, Scripps feels a great deal calmer than he had done yesterday afternoon, when he’d stood on Posner’s doorstep gripping flowers and a book of poetry, heart racing in his chest.  When he had opened the door, Pos had lit up, a small smile pulling the corners of his lips slightly, his eyes brighter than Scripps had seen them in months, face still pale and body shrunken but considerably more _alive_ than it had seemed under the flashing red and blue of screaming ambulance lights.  Though Scripps had known that he had been discharged, that he was conscious and breathing and mobile if not exhausted and frail, the relief had flooded his stomach like a dam breaking.  When Posner had hugged Scripps awkwardly around the shoulders, his body was solid and _real_ , and Scripps could almost forget the shadow in the place of his best friend as he was pushed back onto the ambulance bed like a doll three weeks before.

He had still been too weak to cycle around the streets like he and Scripps often did, but all too happy to sit in his parents’ garden, with his mother’s approval, and listen quietly, companionably, to Scripps’ reading of Wilde’s poetry.  At the invitation of cake after his counselling appointment the next day, Pos had smiled the soft, youthful grin that Scripps knew from their school days, mellowed and dimmed, but still unmistakable.

‘Thank you,’ he’d said quietly, heartbreakingly, and Scripps had known it wasn't really about the cake.

Scripps leans on his bike, propped against the low wall outside the hospital, and checks his watch; Posner should finish his appointment in a few minutes.  He pulls out his journal again.

‘Fragile (Latin: frangere; to break).’

Then:

‘Hope (Germanic or Old English? Look up).’

He underlines ‘look up’ twice, closes his journal, and tucks it safely into his backpack, stuffing his hands roughly into his pockets and watching the clouds roll lazily across the sky as he waits.

‘What’s this week’s experimental recipe, then?’ asks a familiar voice.  Scripps grins and seeks out the source, finding Posner’s body hunched and his eyes tired and darkly circled, but glinting with mischievous humour.

‘I believe it’s a Victoria sponge.’

‘It’ll have to do,’ Pos sighs long-sufferingly, and Scripps chuckles, straightening to grasp the handlebars of his bike.

‘You up to walking or shall I give you a backie?’

Pos smiles weakly. ‘I’ll be fine.'

Hindsight, Scripps thinks, is largely unnecessary when the desired direction is, almost always, forwards.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!! This is unbeta-ed and the first thing I've written so I really appreciate all feedback. There's a lot of personal experience in here to do with being at Oxford (btw the reference to Founder's Tower is from Magdalen College, which I *think* is where Posner ended up, but correct me if I'm wrong), and some of the mental health issues involved, but if you have a different take on it all or any constructive criticism I'd be happy to hear it (and also just to talk about my small sweet son Pos).  
> The doctor is Doctor Griffiths in memory of Richard Griffiths.  
> Some translations of dumb Oxford-speak: 'tutes' are tutorials. 'Matriculation' is a formal Latin ceremony that first-years go through to welcome them into the university. 'Michaelmas' is the autumn term, and 'Trinity' is the summer term.  
> The chapter titles are from Keats' Ode to a Nightingale, a seriously beautiful poem that's one of my faves!


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